The experimental Vulkan backend has now been merged. It is very incomplete, has stability and rendering issues, and does not do buffered rendering yet, but it's a start and performance is looking very, very promising. I'm confident now that it will solidly beat OpenGL even on desktop.

Dual Source blending isn't as important for PPSSPP as it is for Dolphin, but we'll use it where it's available.

I tried running the dev Vulkan backend on my Shield TV and it crashes the emulator. I'm running on Android Marshmallow with the latest Vulkan drivers included. The device is able to run the Nvidia Vulkan demo pretty well. Also, the display for PPSSPP gets reverse landscape once changed to the Vulkan backend. Setting the display to reverse backend in options doesn't do anything.

It doesn't work on SHIELD yet and we're not yet sure why. Although, you first need to change to C++ EGL init to even get to it initializing correctly.

We're likely doing something wrong that the validation layer isn't detecting, is my guess, but it's hard to say. We aren't using as many semaphores as one working demo I saw, but still need to try more things...

As for Windows - you need to install a driver that supports Vulkan. Right now on desktop NVIDIA, this means beta drivers.

Hah, didn't know ppsspp already got Vulkan renderer, nice. I haven't yet seen DualScrBlend implemented by mobile GPU vendors, however we could cooperate to push ARM to raise it with their product management team. Won't be likely implemented in a short-term but who knows, after all they have raised buffer_storage.

Oh and I like someone to explain them why is that we need DualScrBlend, looks like they have doubts about it, pretty much the same as in the past http://bit.ly/1RxfsLs

@Henrik, just to report that Vulkan beckend now work on AMD GPU's, with latest builds. I don't know what was the issue and why it didn't worked for me, but now it does. Anyway, I hope soon Vulkan will work with Buffered Rendering, as some games fail to render graphics with non-buffered on Vulkan (I guess it's because Vulkan is just implemented).

zxcvbad, I suppose that we have to use EXT_shader_framebuffer_fetch there, which I tried to use in GLES, but there was some bug in it. I don't actually own a device that supports it (heh), so we just disabled it for now...

Anyway, that should theoretically allow for "dual source blending" on Mali. I assume it ought to be usable on Vulkan too, although I'm not sure how we detect support for it...

Yeah, FBOs are a bit complicated to implement, we just haven't gotten them working yet. Wanted to get drawing working first, there are lots of parts to FBOs - blitting, depal, depth copies, etc.

Unknown, there's a list of Vulkan features exposed on gpuinfo, dualScrBlend is there, I wonder if potentially it could be used for tracking extensions availability once they gets implemented. Also I've heard GFXbench 5 is going to report Vulkan, it may include a features list. I've got S7 Exynos variant so could run some code on it

So it needs a lot of work yet, right? I made some testing, was expecting a lower CPU usage, for example, but looks the same. My processor runs God of War Ghost of Sparta with 5% usage anyway. ^^ I'd like to test it on mobile phone, but mine isn't compatible, is too old.